Speakers
Description
New Ways in Teaching Active Listening: Contributor Speed Talks
Compared to its reading and writing counterparts, listening is often seen as the most difficult of the four skills to master. While written texts are static and allow for unhurried analysis and comprehension, aural texts are transient, time-bound, and require immediate processing, listening provides the learner with challenges encompassed by issues of speed, accent, and spoken discourse patterns.
With these concerns in mind, this forum presents practical tasks developed according to the principles of active listening; an emerging development in EFL that addresses concerns about the passive nature of traditional approaches. Drawing on Goh’s (2018) framework of five task types—transactional, perceptual, metacognitive, interactive, and communicative—this forum consists of six presentations focusing on the active listening activities. Each presentation outlines the objectives and background for each activity before detailing the preparation and procedure needed for practical application in lessons. Caveats and options for each activity are also provided to help adapt each of these tasks for different classroom contexts and levels. Throughout the forum, the presenters will demonstrate how materials and lesson approaches can be applied to these task type principles which showcases their contributions to a forthcoming collection to be published by TESOL Press, including recent innovations in active listening using AI, this year. Using this knowledge, methods can be adapted to feature innovative or active elements to engage learners with their listening, develop new and active ways to use listening skills, and to help teachers to become innovative while boosting learner confidence in the listening classroom.